Sterling Ruby’s show is a knockout in the best and worst senses of the word. Its combination of outsize, often colorful painting and sculpture has tamed, like no other show, Hauser & Wirth’s gargantuan gallery-of-the-absurd space in Chelsea. Its variety of materials and mediums — immense ashtraylike bronze reliefs; a floor-to-ceiling mobile; looming works in collage, paint and bleach, poured urethane — reveal the physical ease of a true artist and a warts-and-all emphasis on process that seems extremely pertinent.

In terms of letting the warts and seams show, Mr. Ruby is something of an un-Koons, and he embeds all kinds of social, aesthetic and art-historical meanings as he goes. One of the best efforts here is a large slab of urethane with a flutter of red pigment suspended within, on a base covered with yellow Formica and scarred, as if by life, with smudges and graffiti. It skewers and celebrates the fastidiousness of the Minimalist and the Los Angeles finish-fetish crowd.

But the question nags: The size of many of these works verges on oligarchical. Who can display them except the superrich? They seem, like so much art today, implicitly public by virtue of size. Sometimes this works to a degree. The bright-red giant urethane cup, with its extravagant waterfall of drips, is one of my least favorite pieces. But it also reads as a tub of blood and guts, which makes it cheering to picture in a public square, a tribute to the horrors of our time.

Still, works that invite more complex reactions are made on a scale to impress from a half a block away, or across the gallery. This includes the new landscape versions of his typically toxic spray paintings in black, gray and fluorescent tones. It is also true of unstretched works that contrast vertiginous, bravura illusionism with common textiles, like two bright-orange canvases whose vast fiery depth is countered by dust cloths, towels and pieces of padding died black and sewn on the surface.

Mr. Ruby is an outstanding artist, but there are other, deeper ways to bowl us over.